I.F. Stone’s restive ghost!

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Oct 09, 2025

Opinion Global trade

A world with two predatory superpowers

Nations must work out how to contend with Trump’s America and China

Martin Wolf

Editor: A selection form Mr. Wolf’s ‘Two Preditory Superpowers’ essay : that ignores America, as the only Nation to use two sucessive Atomic Bombs against Japan!

Donald Trump’s second term is transforming the world. It is quite likely that the autocratic regime he and his minions in the administration and the Supreme Court are creating will endure. Yet even if it does not, it will have changed the world simply because it has happened. What has happened once can happen again. This must transform views of the future. Yet that future will not just be determined by the US. China is also a superpower. So, what role might it play in this new era?

Let us start with the US. Other democracies used to think it shared core values with them. But this US quite clearly does not. Trump himself is grievance-fuelled, deal-driven and capricious. This alone makes it hard to deal with him. As Célia Belin of the European Council on Foreign Relations adds, his foreign policy “is his domestic agenda, exported”. Thus, she writes, “Trump and his Maga camp are using the same three methods at home and abroad: elimination, transformation and subjugation.” At home, they seek to eliminate the “deep state”, and turn a liberal America into a nationalist one. Abroad, similarly, they seek to eliminate alliances and other commitments and transform allies into vassals.

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These goals are bad for most of the world and foolish for the US. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics takes this long view in a Foreign Affairs article on “The New Economic Geography”. In the post-second-world-war world, he writes, the US provided insurance to other countries against all sorts of risks. But the costs it bore were not uncompensated: other countries invested in the US, opened their economies to US investors, lent money to the US cheaply, made the US dollar the global currency, and turned US capital markets into the hub of global finance. This was then a mutually beneficial deal.

Trump whines that the US has been “ripped off”. The fact, however, is that it has remained the world’s richest and most technologically advanced economy in a period of unparalleled global growth: between 1950 and 2020 average global real GDP per head rose by 360 per cent! Ripped off? Hardly.

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Alas, Trump has killed this grand bargain. In its place, we see a host of unreliable and predatory deals. In addition to imposing huge tariffs on countries that thought they were friends of America, Trump has demanded money be invested at his own discretion, to the great irritation of foreign partners. This is pure gangsterism.

Another way of thinking about what has happened is that in the old world of trust in the US, there was interdependence, but some countries were more dependent than others. This allowed interdependence to be “weaponised”. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue, the US did so, rather freely. Within what were seen as mutually favourable long-term relationships, such weaponisation, notably over the use of sanctions, was tolerated, however grudgingly. But Trump is turning interdependence into a chokehold. That is a very different matter.

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I. F. Stone’s restive ghost.

Political Observer.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 09, 2025

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Editor: Reader begin your political education about Beddoes here!

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist

By Peter Passell

June 27, 1993

The lobby of the Metropole, Moscow’s lovingly restored grand hotel a few blocks from Red Square, is almost deserted on this gray spring afternoon. That’s just fine with Jeffrey D. Sachs, a boyish-looking 38-year-old Harvard professor who is now probably the most important economist in the world. He has appropriated a cluster of comfortable armchairs for a meeting with two members of his team, Americans who work full time in Russia.

The agenda is Russia’s safety net or, more precisely, whether unemployed workers will be able to make ends meet. Russia is plunging out of Communism, if not directly into a capitalist free market. Whether this huge, humiliated nation will stoically bear the pain of the transition is far from clear, and the strength of the safety net could make the difference.

There are plenty of laws on the books, but do they count? “All Russian citizens are legally entitled to free health care,” points out Judith Shapiro, a senior lecturer on policy economics who is on leave from Goldsmith College at the University of London. The catch: they often “only get what they pay for.”

While employees of Government and big enterprises generally have access to adequate service at their own clinics, the less fortunate are denied modern surgery, drugs and even decent sanitation. The problem is apparently growing worse, she notes, because inflation has far outpaced physicians’ salaries, which weren’t high to begin with. Many are now emigrating, or deserting their posts for more lucrative jobs, like driving taxis.

Sachs’s immediate concern is the implication for the Government’s budget, which must be slashed in order to bring inflation under control. If much of the nation’s health expenditures are now buried as fringe benefits on the books of enterprises that depend on Government subsidies, who will pick up the cost once the enterprises are forced to economize?

Getting a handle on the magnitude of the problem is obviously difficult in a country that cannot even explain why life expectancy has fallen sharply in the last two decades. But some number is better than none. And by pressing officials to address this and other pivotal issues, Sachs hopes to accelerate the pace of reform.

Sachs’s message of urgency is not universally accepted. Plenty of Western as well as Russian economists contend that a more gradual approach is not only possible but necessary. “Economic reform is a political process,” says Padma Desai at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. “First, you must build consensus.”

And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”

Still, Sachs’s brand of “shock therapy” has worked elsewhere. And there is good reason to believe that Russia’s future will turn on how well its leaders learn the catechism of change that he has worked so hard to promulgate.

TO AN AMERICAN JADED BY THE CHOICE OF breakfast flakes with or without bran, dates, sugar-coated raisins and 12 essential vitamins, there’s nothing much to tease the palate or the eye in the Gastronom Smolensk near the center of Moscow. Deli counters, dominated by slabs of butter and wheels of stuff that must be cheese, are still presided over by gorgons in white smocks. Cans of vegetables still bear labels that look like rejects from high-school print shop. Odors of sour milk, industrial cleaner and damp wool assault the senses.

But Sachs recognizes what skeptics often miss. “You should have seen these food stores before the price reforms,” he exclaims. Those were the lean years of perestroika, when everything but the dregs ended up in the commissaries of the well connected or fell off the backs of trucks on the trip from the warehouse.

Yes, there still are queues. But the lines are a result of socialist retailing practices, not food shortages. Shoppers first wait to pick out items for weighing and pricing. Then it’s on to the cashier’s line, where, after interminable delay, they exchange their rubles for receipts. Then it’s back to the food-counter line to collect their 200 grams of smoked fish or half-kilo of margarine.

But goods are largely being allocated by price, notes Sachs, “rather than by whom you know.” And the daily frustrations of shopping will be eased when privatized stores discover that supermarket-style checkout saves scads of money.

It’s easy to overlook the significance of these modest signs of progress, and many Russians and Western intellectuals do. In spite of the strong popular vote of confidence that Boris Yeltsin won in the April referendum, they view Sachs’s relentless optimism about Russia’s capacity for rapid change as a denial of the inertia of a thousand years of Slavic feudalism.

But it is precisely Sachs’s impatience, bolstered by seemingly infinite energy and a sophisticated grasp of modern economics, that has made him a force to reckon with. As an adviser to reform-minded governments from Bolivia to Slovenia to Poland, Sachs led successful battles for fiscal and monetary discipline in economies written off by more cautious practitioners of the dismal science. And as a fierce advocate of international debt relief for essentially bankrupt countries, he helped break the financial gridlock that consigned Latin America to economic stagnation for much of the 1980’s. Now he is prodding the radicals who sometimes have the ear of Boris Yeltsin to press their advantage while they can.

“Poland, with its reforms in place, is the fastest-growing economy in Eastern Europe,” says Sachs. “If Poland can do it, so can Russia.”

SACHS, A specialist in monetary theory and international finance, started down the road to fame and controversy by accident. True, he was a prodigy at Harvard, passing his general exams for a Ph.D. in economics while still in college. And he was invited to join the university’s Society of Fellows, an honor that might not qualify the recipient as a Friend of Bill but confers more status in academia than a Rhodes scholarship. And he won tenure in one of the nation’s best economics departments at the age of 29.

But what might have been merely a distinguished scholarly career took an abrupt turn toward the practical in 1985. Harvard was host to a group of Bolivians, Sachs recalls, including one of his former students — “and I was the only economist on the faculty to show up.”

At the time Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, was suffering what may have been the most virulent inflation any economy has ever suffered outside wartime — an astounding 24,000 percent annual rate. When the discussion turned to the near impossibility of stabilizing prices without triggering a killer recession, Sachs demurred. The least painful way to beat inflation, he argued, was a clean break with the past, a regimen of fiscal and monetary discipline combined with an end to economic regulation that protected the elites and blocked the free market. “If you think you can do it,” challenged one official, “come to Bolivia and prove it.”

He did, and quickly persuaded the newly elected Government to go along. Within weeks, hyperinflation was only a bad memory. And after months of tense negotiation, the country settled its mountain of debt to international lenders for about 11 cents on the dollar. “What Bolivia showed,” concludes Sachs, “is that stabilization is doable, possible, sustainable.”

As Sachs is the first to admit, what later become known as shock therapy was not plucked whole from thin air — similar approaches had more or less worked in Germany after both world wars. Sachs’s special insight was that the logic could apply to economies with no collective memory of free markets or history of evenhanded rules of contract law and property rights. In fact, he is confident that revolution is the natural means of economic change. “If you look at how reform has occurred, it has been through the rapid adaptation of foreign models,” he concludes, “not a slow evolution of modern institutions.”

Poland’s success in stabilizing its currency and jump-starting growth is potent evidence that Sachs is right. But no test could be tougher — or more important — than the effort to transform the Russia of Stalin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev into a prosperous, consumer-driven economy in a single generation.

THE PRESSURE IS ON this morning in Sachs’s temporary Moscow headquarters, a tiny suite in the Ministry of Labor that he and his assistants share with a group from the London School of Economics, two quietly efficient translators, a welter of computer equipment and a few empty pizza boxes. (Yes, they deliver in Russia.) A more comfortable home in the Ministry of Finance is still weeks away.

Topic A is the new agreement between the Finance Ministry and the Russian Central Bank, intended to tame the inflation that is running at 20 to 30 percent a month. It is, in Sachs’s view, a cancer on the economy that is close to metastasis. Sachs has been deeply frustrated by the fatalism and political drift over the past year that has brought the economy to the brink. “Nobody says that 26 percent a month inflation is deeply ingrained in the Russian soul,” he scoffs.

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Editor: Just a selection from the New York Times of :

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Editor: Reader no to forget Zanny Minton Beddoes appearance on The Daily Show in fetching leather pants!

Zanny Minton Beddoes – The Economist | The Daily Show

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/7cmWbSv-GOE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Editor: In sum Zanny Minton Beddoes is a Neo-Consevative, with a verifiable history of self-serving War Mongering: in defence of the West’s hegemonic abitions, against an emboldened and superior force of Russia, headed by the indefatigable Putin!

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Editor: As a long time reader of The Economist, I offer the thought that the once ascendent team of Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, were more sophisticated advocates of The War On Terror in its various iterations and wan rationalization ! Yet the New York Times offers this sobering reality !

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Political Observer.

Political Cynic comments on the Fukuyama Clique and it’s diminutive cadre.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 07, 2025

Editor: In a bleek 2415 words Fukuyama makes his case for a his newley acquired Liberalism?

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Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes:

1. Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies.
2. Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status.
3. Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts.
4. The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump.
5. The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure.
6. Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda.
7. Failures of leadership of the progressive Left.
8. Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion.
9. Social media and the internet.

I myself have contributed to this literature, and like everyone else ticked off cause #9, social media and the internet, as one of the contributing factors. However, after pondering these questions for nearly a decade, I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.

I’ve come to this conclusion by process of elimination. It is clear that all nine of the factors above have played some role in the rise of global populism. Populism, however, is a multifaceted phenomenon where certain causal factors are more powerful in explaining particular aspects of the phenomenon, or in explaining why populism manifests itself more powerfully in certain countries than others. For example, while racial resentments obviously play an important role in America, they do not in Poland, which is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world. And yet the populist Law and Justice Party came to power there for eight years.

Editor: Fukuyama presents his 8 point list:

Cause #1, growing economic disparities, was certainly a powerful driver of working-class voters toward populist parties and figures like Trump. However, around half of all Americans voted for Trump at a time when employment and overall growth were relatively high. We were not in the midst of a depression, as was the case in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected and the unemployment rate stood at nearly 25%. While economic stresses from inflation certainly drove many Americans to vote for Trump in 2024, inflation was far higher and more persistent in the 1970s.

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Cause #2, the idea that populism is driven by a nativist white backlash, is a plausible one. While countries like Poland and Hungary don’t share America’s troubled racial history, one could argue that fear of immigration and the dilution of the power of those countries’ dominant ethnic groups was a powerful motivator of populist support. But even in America, racial fears are only part of the story. While Trump gets support from overtly racist groups and figures like the Proud Boys or Nick Fuentes, many non-whites, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, decided to vote for him in 2020 and 2024. Indeed, Trump has succeeded in doing what the Democrats once did: assembling a multi-racial working-class coalition.

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Cause #3, the broad sorting that has occurred where Democrats have become the party of educated professionals living in big cities, while Republican voters are less educated and more rural, is replicated in many countries around the world. But sorting is more likely an effect of a deeper sociological change rather than a factor driving that change. Americans were not deciding to move to the countryside because they were conservative; rather, there was something about the conditions of life in rural versus urban areas that engendered different political perspectives.

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Cause #4, the special talents of Donald Trump, is undeniable; he has many imitators but few have demonstrated the demagogic abilities that he has. But the MAGA movement that he has spawned has succeeded in taking over almost completely one of America’s two major parties, something that doesn’t happen purely by one man’s force of will. Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them. The fact that they were susceptible to this conversion is the phenomenon that needs to be explained.

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Cause #5, the failure of Democratic politicians to solve or even address problems of public order, homelessness, drug use, infrastructure, and housing was obviously important to many centrist and independent voters. This was a big factor as well in many down-ballot races, where blue states and cities compiled poor governance records. But honestly, poor governance under left-leaning politicians has been with us for quite a while (recall New York City under Abe Beame and David Dinkins). One could argue that the social consequences of the pandemic triggered special awareness of these weaknesses, but Trumpism existed well before 2020.

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Causes #6 and #7—intense dislike of left-coded cultural issues like DEI, affirmative action, political correctness, LGBTQ policies, immigration, and poor leadership by Democrats—are obviously related. It was poor judgment by Democratic politicians that allowed the party to be defined by these cultural factors, rather than staking out clear positions on economic issues of more general appeal. The problem with seeing cultural issues as central to the rise of populism, however, is that they have been around for quite a while. Feminism and social dysfunctions like drug addiction and family breakdown date back to the late 1960s, while identity politics made its debut in the ‘70s and ‘80s. These social movements engendered backlash and contributed to the elections of conservative presidents like Nixon and Reagan. Yet they did not set off the kind of furious reactions seen in the 2020s.

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Cause #8, human nature, has been raised recently by Bill Galston in his new book Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, and celebrated in a recent review by Jonathan Rauch. Galston argues that ugly polarization and partisanship have always been part of human politics; the liberal civility that contemporary democracies have enjoyed in recent decades is an anomaly that needs to be explained, and not the norm of human existence.

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Editor: Fukuyama and his cadre of political experts who guides the readers way to what? William A. Galston, author of Anger, Fear, Domination (Yale University Press, 2025); Robert Tracy McKenzie, author of We the Fallen People (InterVarsity Press, 2021); and James Kimmel Jr., author of The Science of Revenge (Harmony, 2025). The UnPopulist. Reader who can forget ‘Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?’ And other writers, like Fukuyama, who trade upon their expertise that reads like maladroit self-adulation. Some samples are instructive:

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On Human Nature:

The problem with any explanation of a social phenomenon that takes human nature as its starting point is the question of “why now?” Human nature has presumably been constant throughout human history; it does not explain why people’s behavior turned suddenly ugly midway through the second decade of the 21st century.

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On the Rise Of Populism:

Any satisfactory explanation for the rise of populism has to deal with the timing question; that is, why populism has arisen so broadly and in so many different countries in the second decade of the 21st century.

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On Conspiratorial Thinking:

As I wrote in a recent article, the current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes.

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Conspiracy theories have always been part of right-wing politics in the United States. But today’s conspiracies are incredibly outlandish, like the QAnon belief that the Democrats are operating secret tunnels under Washington, D.C. and drinking the blood of young children.

Cause # 9 appears:

This is what leads me to think that Cause #9, the rise of the internet and social media, is the one factor that stands above the others as the chief explanation of our current problems. Broadly speaking, the internet removed intermediaries, traditional media, publishers, TV and radio networks, newspapers, magazines, and other channels by which people received information in earlier periods.

The Parallel Universe appears:

While previously “truth” was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got.

Editor: Reader note that Fukuyama posseses no actual literary ability or talent, that will come later. As he will attempt later to burnish his political creather!

Not Yet Finished :

Previously, a major newspaper or magazine could reach perhaps a million readers, usually in a single geographic area; today, an individual influencer can reach hundreds of millions of followers without regard to geography.

The Arrival of Renee DiResta:

Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

No number of empirical scientific studies could overcome the desire of many people who wanted to believe that there were evil forces in American society pushing things that were harmful to them, and they saw plentiful confirmation of their views on the internet.

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That is what algorithms do: they don’t understand meaning or context, but simply seek to maximize attention by directing people to popular content.

Video Gaming appears:

This connection was brought home by the case of the young man, Tyler Robinson, who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk. Robinson was evidently radicalized on the internet. He was an active gamer who inscribed memes from that world on the shell casings of the bullets he used.

Editor: In the above Fukuyama dons the triple-personas of Edward Jay Epstein, Arlen Specter and The Warren Comission!

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Editor: The Final Two Paragraphs of Fukuyama, and its dismal final sentence!

So the advent of the internet can explain both the timing of the rise of populism, as well as the curious conspiratorial character that it has taken. In today’s politics, the red and blue sides of America’s polarization contest not just values and policies, but factual information like who won the 2020 election or whether vaccines are safe. The two sides inhabit completely different information spaces; both can believe that they are involved in an existential struggle for American democracy because they begin with different factual premises as to the nature of the threats to that order.

None of this means that causes 1 through 8 are not important or helpful in leading us to an understanding of our present situation. But in my view, it is only the rise of the internet that can explain how we can be in an existential struggle for liberal democracy, at a time in history when liberal democracy has never been as successful.

Persuasion

It’s the Internet, Stupid

We are delighted to feature Francis Fukuyama in the pages of Persuasion once again. Some of you may not know that he writes a regular column, “Frankly Fukuyama,” which is proudly part of the Persuasion family, and which you need to manually opt in to receive…

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13 days ago · 378 likes · 20 comments · Francis Fukuyama

Political Cynic.

Newspaper Reader.

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Oct 06, 2025

Editor: Reader before you read my selection of Mr.Colevile’s adoration of Mrs. Thatcher, read William Keegan from Sat 20 Apr 2013 19.03 EDT!

Headline: Margaret Thatcher: the woman, the legend … and the myths

Far from being a time of economic miracles, growth in the 80s was no better than it was in the 70s: and inflation was conquered only by the effects of a long and damaging recession

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/21/margaret-thatcher-woman-legend-myths

William Keegan

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ransom Stoddard (played by James Stewart) goes to great lengths, many years after the event, to explain to the local newspaper editor that it was Tom Doniphon (played by John Wayne) who did the deed, not himself. But the editor tears up his notes and declares that he prefers the legend to the facts.

It has been like that following the death of Margaret Thatcher, with the latter in the role of “The Woman Who Transformed the British Economy”. As one who chronicled events from 1979-90, I have to say it did not feel like that then and does not feel like that now.

One would expect a “transformation” of the economy to show up in the statistics for economic growth. But what the facts show, as opposed to the legend, is that the annual rate of increase in GDP between 1980 and 1989 was 2.2%, exactly the same as the 2.2% per annum recorded between 1970 and 1979, the decade when everything was supposed to be going to pot.

These statistics come from the late Christopher Johnson’s balanced assessment of a most controversial period, The Economy under Mrs Thatcher 1979-1990. Johnson concludes: “Mrs Thatcher is likely to go down in history more for her political and military than for her economic and social record.” As for “lasting” effects on economic growth, the average growth of GDP since 2005 has been an exiguous 0.6%. Some transformation!

There was always something bogus about Thatcher. The prayer she quoted in 1979 about peace and harmony was the work of a French cleric during the first world war, and had nothing to do with St Francis. Harmony was the last thing Britain’s first woman prime minister brought to her country.

Unfortunately, the sale of council houses at knockdown prices, while popular, led to no serious attempt to build more social housing – this didn’t fit with the dogma – so the seeds were sown for the housing crisis of today.

Productivity was generally considered one of the successes, but this was less a case of a miraculous industrial revival than of a higher batting average because fewer people were playing. I recall asking whether, in their obsession with small business, it was the Thatcherites’ ambition to turn every large business into a small one.

The problems were evident from the beginning. Having inherited an inflation rate of 10% in 1979 and promised to halve, if not eliminate, it, Thatcher presided over a policy – monetarism – which, far from conquering inflation, was so ineffective that within a year inflation had risen to almost 22%. Thanks to the worst recession since the second world war, the year-on-year rate of inflation was down to 3.7% by the time of the 1983 election.

It was not just dead industrial wood that was lost: many thriving firms went under. At one stage, the chairman of ICI asked Thatcher whether, given the squeeze, she wanted firms such as his to remain in Britain.

Thatcher was the most unpopular prime minister since records began – until the Falklands war. She was lucky to win the 1983 election, because the opposition was split, thanks to the breakaway from Labour by the Social Democrats – who, if they had stayed, might have helped to dissuade Labour from running on a vulnerable ticket.

Apart from trade union reform and misleading achievements in productivity, the Thatcher period was noted for offering privatisation not only to this country but to the rest of the world. Some was good; some was bad.

But the gravamen of the economic charge against her is the neglect of manufacturing industry. Although output did grow a little over the period, our performance was far more sluggish, vis-a-vis the rest of Europe and the wider OECD area, than you would think from all the crowing about economic “miracles”. As Jim Prior, her first employment secretary, wrote of his monetarist colleagues: “Their attitude to manufacturing industry bordered on the contemptuous. They shared the view … that we were better suited as a nation to being a service economy and should no longer worry about production.”

Having created an unemployment crisis in order to reverse the (largely) self-inflicted doubling of inflation, the Thatcher government proceeded to create a “dependency culture”, massaging the figures by encouraging the jobless to claim disability benefit.

Privatisation hardly figured in the 1979 election. It was subsequently seized upon as a diversion from the wider failure of economic policy and a useful source of revenue. But the most adventitious source of revenue was the North Sea – a source to which one Thatcherite would refer as “what we are using to finance unemployment”.

Poverty increased dramatically, as society became more unequal, and the postwar consensus was destroyed. As the sacked cabinet minister Lord Gilmour observed: “The sacrifice imposed on the poor produced nothing miraculous except for the rich.”

Eventually, we had the Lawson boom, with inflation back to 10%, and, all other panaceas having failed, recourse was had to the Exchange Rate Mechanism to control inflation.

Well before the poll tax and the difficulties over Europe, the impression gaining ground in her cabinet was that the prime minister was showing signs of going off her head. The manner in which she behaved, and, finally, the way her cabinet colleagues responded, poisoned the Conservative party.

No wonder they prefer the legend.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/21/margaret-thatcher-woman-legend-myths

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Newspaper Reader’s

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Fundamentally, the Tories have two problems, one big and one small. The smaller problem is that everyone hates them because they ran the country really badly. That’s difficult, but it’s the sort of thing that a political party can — eventually — recover from.

But the bigger problem is that it’s not entirely clear whether the nation really is “Conservative by instinct”. I’ve spent most of the past month studying another Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, who, as Jason Cowley notes, was born 100 years ago this month. What struck me anew was not just the strength of her philosophy but her willingness — even her determination — to evangelise for it. As I point out in the resulting essay, to be published soon, she could barely go a paragraph without making an argument from principle.

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Indeed, when they’ve won big in the past, under Baldwin and Macmillan, Thatcher and Johnson, that’s been exactly their coalition.

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So what to do? Ultimately, I keep coming back to another Thatcher quote: “It’s only on the basis of truth that power should be won — or indeed can be worth winning.”

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Editor: Mr. Colevile essay relies on Mrs. Thatcher, to add ballast to his otherwise wan argument. The Reader needs to pay attention Colvile’s political chatter, she just needs to look to Starmers jailing of dissidents, and Coleviles political stance of opportunistic Fellow Traveleing, as expresive of political propinquity!

Newspaper Reader.

https://www.ft.com/content/d2d740f4-a185-4a98-8035-75f18dad47c6

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Oct 06, 2025

https://www.ft.com/content/d2d740f4-a185-4a98-8035-75f18dad47c6

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The leftwing Socialist party also threatened to vote the government down unless Lecornu suspended Macron’s signature pension reforms.

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Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon described Macron as “the origin of the chaos” and called on him to resign to enable fresh presidential elections, a move the president has repeatedly ruled out.

American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of Creditworthiness

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Oct 04, 2025

Product Details

Newspaper Reader comments.

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Oct 04, 2025

Opinion Life & Arts

The war against the quite good

The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below

Janan Ganesh

https://www.ft.com/content/0fc44c6b-277c-4472-a235-65f59a9195f3

Editor: Janan almost pulls out all the stops, for his latest, what to name it? Self-congratulaton in its future iteration? All in jest of a kind? His readers wallow in his impecable education University of Warwick, University College London, Harris Academy South Norwood education not quite an ‘Oxbrideger’ but in close proximity, like his relationship to his deathbed?

On my deathbed, as the burial site at Westminster Abbey is being prepared, and a weeping Nobel delegation bother me at my 12-bedroom Highgate estate with still another prize, I will spare one last thought for the species. What about people below the genius threshold? How is society to look after the merely very competent?

Editor: Under the rubric of ‘The Broken Masters of Capital’ which Ganesh laudes!

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Peter Thiel made this point on The James Altucher Show while discussing his recently released book (Zero to One). At minute 11:35 of the podcast, he mentions how some of the more successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley share this common “dysfunction”:

“One of the strange things in Silicon Valley is that so many of these successful entrepreneurs suffer from a mild form of Asperger’s or something like that. And I always think of this as an incredible indictment of our society: What sort of society is it where, if you do not have Asperger’s, you will pick up on all these social cues that discourage you from pursuing creative original ideas.”

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View at Medium.com

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I ask because the world is in danger of over-rewarding an inspired few. The best AI researchers and engineers can name their price as companies vie to hoard talent. Sam Altman talks of “crazy intense comp for a very small number of people right now”. Something similar is going on in finance and law. There is no longer much squeamishness about admitting the uneven distribution of talent. Woke, with its flattening ethos, has ebbed, and unions are weak in the most advanced industries.

Editor: the final sentence of this paragraph reminds this reader of Ganesh of another time, of the evolution of his talent, with the adaptation of the feuilleton, no matter how etiolated as expressive tool!

At this point, the moral custom is to worry about people with the fewest marketable skills. But it is not as if the world was treating them well before. The real news is the fallen status of those just a notch or two down from the most sought-after. Will someone not speak up for the quite good?

Editor: The Reader has to wonder at Ganesh political/moral trajectory here?

A quite good job in journalism used to be sweet indeed. Even newspapers in secondary American cities would post staff to New Delhi and Rome. That life is still attainable at the very grandest titles but the Baltimore Sun, say, closed its last foreign bureau long ago.

Editor: In this paragraph Ganesh regales his readership with borrowed chatter!

A quite good artist used to do well. Before the invention of the gramophone, said the writer and advertising executive Rory Sutherland, “there was a decent living to be made as the fifth best operatic tenor in Denmark”. Once audiences were no longer confined to local music, these singers lost out to the best in the world market. In the Spotify era, when the marginal cost of streaming a song from another continent is zero, pray for them.

Editor: Ganesh regales the reader with : ‘a sort of Muskian impatience’ & ‘The difference between quite good and great trading is measurable. And so the worship of the very best becomes right (or at least righteous). This Reader just wonders at Ganesh’s flacid 105 words!

The quite good will always prosper in lines of work that are site-specific, and therefore somewhat screened from world competition. There are still loads of quite good restaurants. But in tech, multi-manager hedge funds and other disembodied sectors, which don’t just make the largest fortunes but also set wider cultural norms, a sort of Muskian impatience with the less-than-brilliant is part of the atmosphere. And not because these are colder people. The difference between quite good and great music is arbitrary. The difference between quite good and great trading is measurable. And so the worship of the very best becomes right (or at least righteous).

Editor: What a reader confronts here is a Ganesh, who self-presents in the guise of ‘dry liberal’ a term of wan political abuse?

The dry liberal in me isn’t so worried. If a luminous few make world-changing breakthroughs in their field, we might come to regard them as cheap at the price. If not, the auction for their talent should calm down over time.

Editor: Ganesh in this paragraph features: latent Tory, the most primitive Marxian, New England trader, George III’s taxes,….

It is the latent Tory, the worrier about social order, that does wince a bit. You’d have to be C to still believe that revolutions must always come from far below. In fact, it is the Weimar shopkeeper inflated out of their savings, the New England trader who felt George III’s taxes, who often rebels. That is, the person who sees their quite good status threatened. The person with enough education and confidence to assert themselves.

Editor: The once usual Ganesh political bravado is ebbing! The quotation of Tyler Cowan, of the utterly reactinaty Free Press, and its notorious cadre of Zionist Apologists alerts The Reader!

The 21st century equivalent would seem to be — what? — a smart if not quite dazzling graduate, snubbed by the top-end recruitment round and less and less able to fall back on the ever-scarcer graduate entry job. That is a lot of savvy people to upset. The economist Tyler Cowen wrote that Average Is Over. It would be a bigger threat to civic peace if even Far Above Average Is Over.

Editor: The Reader confronts the final paragraph framed by the Premier League vs. Arsenal framed by ‘ with Liverpool somewhat Nietzschean in their stress on the epic individual. What fun it will be to watch a wider social tension play out in miniature, without the disturbing stakes’ Reader this is seriocomic shit!

At this time of year, the Premier League season settles into some kind of pattern. What have we learnt? That Arsenal’s average player is probably better than Liverpool’s average player, but Liverpool’s elite few trump Arsenal’s elite few. This is a contest between not just two different recruitment strategies but almost two contrasting world views, with Liverpool somewhat Nietzschean in their stress on the epic individual. What fun it will be to watch a wider social tension play out in miniature, without the disturbing stakes.

https://www.ft.com/content/0fc44c6b-277c-4472-a235-65f59a9195f3

Newspaper Reader.

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Editor: A well agued reply to Mr. Ganesh!

N.R.

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Editor: Is this the precurser of Janan Ganesh ?

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https://www.economist.com/business/2025/10/05/bonfire-of-the-middle-managers

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 03, 2025

Adam Tooze, with help from Hegel & Intellectual Poser Francis Fukuyama, produces a Political/Philosophical History in Aspic, with Putin as his Anti-Hero

Political Cynic scoffs!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Apr 09, 2022

The reader, before she attempts to read Mr. Tooze’s 3,415 word essay, might profit from reading Molly Fischer’s essay at New York Magazine.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/adam-tooze-profile.html

Ms. Fischer’s essay at 5,224 words wallows in Fan Magazine gush, that informs the magazine’s readers what they should ‘think’ about Mr. Tooze, and his Fan Base! this magazine tells its readers where to eat, it keeps its readers current on the most watched television/internet programs, and its political columnists keep their readership up to date on what they should think about politics, and Madam Clairvoyant…, the latest bargains on clothes, shoes and other commodities that a New York magazine reader might need- Its a would be Silver-Fork Handbook for those who live and die by the latest trends, in the life of the New York cognoscenti, or its pretenders. The pretense of being dans la mode is the lingua franca of New York social life!

Mr. Tooze in his near historically sophisticated essay, though he can’t quite match the talent of Janan Ganesh for such rhetorical curlicues, and stylistic panache, as cover for his reactionary politicking! Mr. Tooze manages to impress with adroitly executed, not to speak of its intellectual/philosophical breath, of his particular expression of a History Made to Measure! These paragraphs demonstrates Mr. Tooze’s facility, to engage in historical pastiche of near understatement?

It was the French Revolution that defined the stakes in modern war as an existential clash between nations in arms, in which fundamental principles of rule were in question. War was the world spirit on the march. That is what the German poet Goethe thought he witnessed at the Battle of Valmy in 1792, where a rag-tag revolutionary army unexpectedly turned back a much better-equipped counter-revolutionary invasion by royalist and Prussian forces. “From this day forth,” he wrote, “begins a new era in the history of the world.” Two days later, the French Republic was declared.

A “world-soul” on horseback is what Hegel thought he saw, as Napoleon cantered through the city of Jena in October 1806 on his way to the battle that would push the Prussian state to the brink of extinction. War was not simply a violent practice of princes, a duel writ large. War was History with a capital H – the “slaughter-bench”, Hegel would call it – “at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised”. It was something both fascinating and horrifying. Transformative and yet also on the edge of tipping over into absolute violence, as in the horrors of guerrilla war in Spain, depicted by Goya. Two centuries later, in the commentary on the war in Ukraine, one can feel the same spirit stirring.

The spectacle of war has always evoked mixed emotions. On the one hand, enthusiasm and something akin to relief: here, finally, is real politics, real freedom. And, on the other hand, horror at the violence, suffering and destruction.

In the wake of Waterloo in 1815, both diplomacy and contemporary social science tried to put the genie back in the bottle. For all his grandeur, Napoleon had been defeated. Millions had died in the global wars sparked by the French Revolution, and his project of modernising empire had come to naught. The lesson, according to the followers of the sociologist Auguste Comte, was that the future belonged to industry, not to the soldiers.

…

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/04/war-at-the-end-of-history?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1649426638

Later in his essay Mr. Tooze engages in this explanation of American Seer Francis Fukuyama:

That this terrifying stand-off ended with the largely peaceful overthrow of the communist regimes in Europe in 1989 persuaded Francis Fukuyama, then a member of the policy planning staff at the US State Department, that we had reached “the End of History”. This is often described as a triumph of capitalism and democracy. It was certainly that, but no less significant was that the West had won the military contest without firing a shot in anger. The Warsaw Pact folded. By the time of Leonid Brezhnev, from the 1960s onwards, the Soviet system no longer seemed worth dying for. Mercifully, that spared Nato the question of whether the world was better off dead than red.

Anchored in American power and depoliticised neoliberalism, Fukuyama’s vision of the End of History remains a compelling interpretation of the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ideological contest seemed settled in favour of a one-dimensional vision of liberal democracy, the rule of law and markets.

The achievement of the End of History consisted in not just the triumph of the liberal model, but in that it was attained bloodlessly. That gave it both its sense of inevitability and, as Fukuyama wrote, its post-heroic quality.

Of course, the End of History did not mean the end of events or the end of war. That threat of nuclear destruction continued to hang over us. Under the de-targeting agreement of 1994, the coordinates of major cities were removed from the computers of Russian and American intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). But they could be loaded back if required. We still live under the menace of absolute atrocity. Meanwhile, actual wars have continued to be fought. But war has changed

A Strussian offers a warmed over Hegelianism, and the American Intellectual/Philosophical Provincials were instantly smitten by Fukuyama’s World Historical Merde. And what does ‘depoliticised neoliberalism’ represent but an utter lack of intellectual honesty, in service to self-promotion of Mr. Tooze – to establish his political conformity. This whole essay is awash in that imperative.

More History Made to Measure foreshortened:

The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s was perhaps the last conflict in which two sides commanding substantial armed forces had everything at stake; any means could be mobilised to secure victory and neither side could afford to lose. The bloodiest wars in more recent decades – notably those in the former Yugoslavia, central Africa and Syria – were sprawling civil wars, often involving multiple non-state actors. In Iraq and Afghanistan the stakes were existential, but only for the locals. The US, which led the invasions, was shaken by the 9/11 attacks, but the global war on terror was always more of a policing action than a conventional war.

The Reader has arrived, after Mr. Tooze groundwork has been laid from the large canvas to the mere sketch, at Putin:

The question posed by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is whether in this fundamental sense the spell of the End of History has finally been broken. Has history restarted in a tragic key, as President Macron has recently put it? Have we reached the end of the end of military history?

The answer we give to that question initially depends on the interpretation of Putin’s motives.

There is yet 2,379 words left in Mr. Tooze’s polemic against Putin, still framed by ‘The End of History’, a crippled antique by a Staussian foot-soldier. The topic sentences of the remains of this essay, offer some vital clues as to the arguments Mr. Tooze marshals. Note that Mr. Tooze employs the Straussian rhetorical strategy of exhausting both the critical acuity of The Reader, and her patience!

The most obvious reading is that he has never accepted the verdict delivered by history in 1991.

But if this is his basic motivation why in 2022 was he willing to risk the ultimate trial of battle?

One argument is that Putin gambled because he is a man of war.

This embrace of war leads some analysts to describe Putin as a man of the 19th century.

These are pleasingly simple ideas.

The defining characteristic of the Russian invasion, other than its brutality, is the sense of history repeating itself as farce.

In this reading, far from rupturing the End of History, or forcing a return to primal conflict, Putin saw himself as adjusting an anomaly created by the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych government in 2014.

Perhaps the most telling moment came when the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war of choice”.

Putin’s invasion and the attack on Iraq in 2003 by the US-led coalition have in common a disregard for both international law and geopolitical logic that left much of the rest of the world aghast.

In the war in Ukraine, the wildcard is the Ukrainians.

But we should beware our Eurocentric prejudices.

What marks this war as different is that the Ukrainian resistance has stopped Putin’s invasion in its tracks.

The result is that Putin awakens from the resentful nightmare of Russia’s post-Cold War memory into a bona fide, existential crisis, a “real war” that the Russian army is far from certain of winning

Again, the experience of defeat and discredit on the part of the larger power is not itself novel.

To escape the nightmare, Putin may choose to escalate the invasion, even toying with the nuclear option

Putin may have challenged the post-Cold War order but, given the liminal status of Ukraine – neither a member of the EU nor of Nato – and the underwhelming performance of the Russian military, which makes an attack on the Baltics or Poland seem unlikely, it is up to others, principally China and the Western alliance, to decide what to make of this clash.

Ukraine, of course, has every interest in using the momentum of its early successes to widen the conflict.

Clearly, if it so chose, Nato could turn this war into World War Three.

Putin’s allegation that Ukraine was being developed as a base from which to strike at the soft underbelly of Russia seems less plausible now than it did before the war.

Although Joe Biden has blurted out his indignation that bad characters like Putin are in charge of modern states, the West remains shy about embracing regime change as its ultimate goal

As critics of the interwar order like Carl Schmitt sensed, the hegemony of the victorious powers in 1918 threatened the first End of History.

In 2022, if Putin were to be brought down by military frustration and economic exhaustion, and were his regime to be replaced by one that was pro-Western and ready for peace, all those who have levelled cheap criticism at Fukuyama over the years would owe him a giant apology

However, if the war does not escalate to a Third World War and Putin’s regime does not collapse, there will be no option but to face the difficult business of diplomacy and peace-making

Mr. Tooze demonstrates that he is a political/moral conformist, he is not John Mearsheimer, but another of a long line of apologist for the murderous political interventionism, of the Centrism of the political present: the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives!

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Not to the reader:

On question of Hegel, let me offer my experience of trying to read The Phenomenology of the Spirit: I was stopped at entry 243, as I recall it in utter bewilderment, and then read Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit by Michael N. Forster. It took me months to read this book, impressive doesn’t quite cover the scope of Prof. Forster scholarship.

Political Cynic

Political Observer offers……….

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 03, 2025

Editor: Reader don’t waste your time, with tired old and shopworn Neo-Liberal dogmas!! Jeffery Friedman (Editor) and his experts offer critical evaluations, not just carefully modulated aplogetics, that eventuated in the 2006-2008 Economic Collapse !

Critical Review: Hayek the Good, the Bad, the Ugly (Volume 25, Nos. 3-4, 2013) Paperback – January 1, 2013

by Jeffery Friedman (Editor)

The easy to read Table of Contents, offer The Reader titles, their authors.

Political Observer.

Newspaper Reader opines: With the President purchased by Adelson, The House and Senate in the control of AIPAC, Bari Weiss ascends to CBS!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 03, 2025

From the Magazine

May 2019 Issue

Mad About Bari Weiss: The New York Times Provocateur the Left Loves to Hate

The Times op-ed writer is a Trump-loathing theater nerd who studied at a feminist yeshiva and used to date Kate McKinnon. She also led a controversial protest at Columbia, and popularized the “intellectual dark Web.” The contradictions of a social-media lightning rod.

By Evgenia PeretzPhotography by Martin SchoellerStyled by Nicole Chapoteau

April 24, 2019

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/bari-weiss-the-new-york-times-provocateur?srsltid=AfmBOor111txPlbZvDNLxCC6Smbdi-xZMTgqOerRJgQ5YxjBVM2wiJR_

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Media

Bari Weiss to be named top editor at CBS News

Paramount Skydance will acquire the journalist’s publication, the Free Press, which she started after quitting the New York Times in 2020.

October 3, 2025 at 9:08 a.m. EDT Today at 9:08 a.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/10/03/cbs-news-bari-weiss-skydance-paramount/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert

By Will Oremus , Caroline O’Donovan, Jeremy Barr

The newly formed media giant Paramount Skydance will acquire the Free Press, an online publication, and install its iconoclastic founder, Bari Weiss, as editor in chief of CBS News, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Paramount Skydance is expected to announce Monday that it will pay $150 million in cash and stock for the Free Press and name Weiss to CBS News’s top editorial job, said one of the people, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans before they are formally announced.

The move heralds a new era at the 98-year-old broadcast network, whose corporate parents made moves to address the Trump administration’s allegations of liberal bias as they sought approval for an $8 billion merger that was finalized in August. The appointment of Weiss, a staunch advocate of Israel and frequent critic of the mainstream media, to lead the company’s news operation follows its hiring last month of a conservative-leaning ombudsman to field complaints about the network’s editorial coverage.

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Editor: Bari Weiss acts here as just another part of Zionist Cadre, she being the focus of attetion, that masks actual players in this journalistic coup d’état!

Newspaper Reader.